Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  When I tried to tell Peggy all this, she understood at once. “It’s those pitiful little shops,” she said. I’m spending the night at Alto Cedro, and shall go back to Laguna Beach tomorrow. This is Ben’s birthday. He has a snare drum and Derek a clarinet.

  Ben’s beagle Cerberus has all the airs of a lapdog. He’s like a son-in-law of whom Peggy and the rest of the family don’t altogether approve. Peggy looked out of the window the other morning and saw Cerberus in the garden wistfully confronting a rabbit, with a look which seemed to say, “Oh dear—why can’t we be friends?” He didn’t attempt to chase it, and this shocked Peggy. Even in a pacifist household, the women like a man to be a man.

  October 1. All day long, the sun didn’t shine. A slow grey swell on the ocean. Swam with Johnny Dickinson. The house next to the one the Dickinsons have rented used to belong to a paralytic. In order to get him down on to the beach, a kind of miniature tramway with a wooden car was built down the cliff. But now the tracks are rusted and grown over with tough green ice plant.

  October 2. Throughout the night, the waves have been storming the rocks. This morning, the ocean has the wild grey face of a madman after hours of raving—all raddled with yellow foam. Around the reefs, the water is white like boiling milk, and the jag-edges of the lava stream with hissing niagaras. I sleep with my bedroom door open to the sea, in a tremendous, and strangely comforting chaos of noise.

  I would like to remind myself by recording, once more, the absolute value of keeping the prayer hours, even when they have been as unrewarding as during the last few days. The discipline makes a track down which your life can run, with immensely decreased danger of a really bad swerve. But then I ask myself—can I decide, of my own volition, to pray or not to pray? Isn’t the praying, in itself, just a symptom of a favorable mood? The part of my will of which I’m aware, is so rotten, so full of cracks and breaks badly spliced or half-grown-together that I feel I couldn’t trust it to make me lick a postage stamp. So that leaves me back with the utter mystery of grace.

  October 12. Back at Peggy’s since October 5. Every day, I go down to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where Denny is recovering from an operation on the scar tissue of his old hernia. Most days, I see the Swami, and we work together on his translation of the Gita, turning it into more flexible English. This is a very valuable way of studying, because I have to make absolutely sure I understand what each verse means. Some of the Sanskrit words have meanings that sound very bizarre in English, and the Swami, who has long since learnt to paraphrase them, has practically to be psychoanalyzed before he’ll admit to the literal translation.

  No call from the draft board yet.

  In the evenings, Ben plays his drums. He now has a big drum, a snare drum, a woodblock, a cowbell and a cymbal—all bought in a splurge of his birthday money. He plays this one-man orchestra in the baggage room under the living room, and the whole house shakes. It’s fascinating to watch him. He starts quite gently, keeping time to some tune on the portable radio. Gradually, he speeds up, becomes more reckless, more decisive. His hands seem to take over from his brain, darting here and there over the instruments—trembling in a furious tattoo, lashing out vindictively at the cymbal, thundering on the big drum, hammering on the block like a woodpecker. His face changes. It is no longer attentive and alert; it relaxes into a curiously peaceful, mindless half-smile in the midst of the din. It’s as if all the violence, all the frustration in Ben’s nature had been externalized and resolved: it is around him, not within him; and he sits in the midst of it, refreshed and calm. I’m no judge, but it seems to me that Ben has real talent for drumming. Peggy dislikes it, however. With her own background of classical music, she hates jazz, and would much rather that Ben had learnt the piano or the violin. It isn’t apparent to her—as it is to me as an outside observer—that Ben’s preference for jazz was psychologically inevitable. He inherited a strong musical talent from Peggy, but his instinctive resistance to her domination forced him to find a kind of music which didn’t “belong” to her: it had to be jazz or nothing.

  The weather is quite cool today, and very clear. You can see the ocean, a hard grey line, beyond the gap in the hill. Sometimes, in the morning, there is thick uncanny fog, fuming up the canyon, choking the little valley, pressing in upon the huge aquarium-windows of this house, until you feel like a fish in a lighted glass tank, with the plants and bushes of the garden peering in at you like dimly outlined spectators. The tall papyrus, with tiny drops of moisture, diamond clear, on each point. The ginger lilies, whose withered heads must not be cut off, or they won’t bloom next year. The white jasmine, breathless with perfume, all along the terrace wall, and the blue-eyed plumbago bushes. The crimson and white hibiscus flowers which Peggy cuts and lays singly on a table or shelf, like offerings. And the red-black light-absorbing dahlias which she puts in a vase on my desk, because she knows I like them. They’re called “Bishop of Llandaff.”

  Peggy gardens and housecleans all day long, almost instinctively. Even while she’s chattering away to you, her body darts this way and that, with anxious, birdlike abruptness—snipping off a flower head, flicking dust from a chair. Sometimes, she becomes aware of it, and murmurs, “Sorry, darling—I must just—” She pounces upon her task, performs it, returns smiling apologetically: “Yes? You were saying—” She runs everything—including my spiritual life. Ben and Dek have a small hut at the end of the garden which they used to play and sometimes sleep in. Peggy has commandeered it as my meditation room. I’m supposed to go off there, three times a day. Peggy sees that I do, too. If we’re talking and it’s around six o’clock, she’ll say, “Darling—I don’t want to hurry you—but—you see, supper’s at seven-fifteen this evening—and I thought perhaps—” She wanted to stop Ben from drumming between six and seven, lest I should be disturbed, and I’ve had a hard time persuading her not to. In the morning, if I oversleep, she’ll look at me reproachfully: “Darling—if you want to—I mean—do whatever you like—but I can easily keep breakfast till you’re ready—” And out to the hut I have to go.

  The Swami’s stories of Brahmananda. How he received Vivekananda when he returned from America, and prostrated himself and offered a garland. Vivekananda refused it, and prostrated himself before Brahmananda and offered him the garland, saying, “The Son of the Guru is also the Guru.” Brahmananda, not to be outdone, offered Vivekananda the garland for the second time, replying, “But the elder Brother is the same as the Father.” Vivekananda didn’t have any comeback, so he gave up and accepted the garland.

  In 1923, when the Swami was planning to go to the Himalayas and practice meditation and austerities, he was told by his superiors that he was being sent to America, to the San Francisco center. “But I can’t teach!” he protested, in dismay. “Nonsense,” replied one of the elder monks, severely: “You have seen the son of God, and you dare to say you cannot teach?”

  October 16. Denny introduced me to a friend of his from camp, Collins George. Collins is a Negro, but you couldn’t tell it: he could easily “pass” anywhere for a South American. This, actually, makes his position all the more difficult, because he is extremely conscientious, as well as sensitive and intelligent. He can go into restaurants where Negroes aren’t allowed, and yet at the same time he doesn’t feel he ought to: he feels compelled to tell people what he is. And, as a conscientious objector, he has enough troubles of his own, anyway. He lost his job teaching French at a Negro college because the staff were against pacifists. Denny’s attitude toward Collins is at once protective and sadistic—complicated, no doubt, by his own southern upbringing. Collins is fat, soft and sensitive, and Denny can’t help saying cruel things to him, every so often; and yet he has put himself aggressively on Collins’s side in camp (quite unnecessarily, because the Quakers lean over backwards to avoid even the slightest hint of race prejudice; and it would take a Denny to detect involuntary symptoms of it in their attitude). Through Collins, Denny has made friends with Hall Johnson, the leader
of the Negro choir. When Denny and Collins are on leave together, they often go down to night spots, in the colored part of town, and Denny is proud of being accepted in places where whites are not welcome.

  October 20. Denny is out of hospital and has gone to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He has decided that he needs a little luxury to help his convalescence. I went down there today and swam in their pool. It is a USO137 Center, and servicemen are allowed in at certain hours. There was one very drunk sailor-boy who told us all that he was on leave and going to see his folks in Alabama. He whistled like a steam engine, out of tune, and did running dives into the pool, splashing everybody from head to foot. He was under the impression that he had a date with a movie star named Ellen, or maybe Helen, he wasn’t certain; so he asked each girl in turn: “Hey, beautiful—what’s your name?” A snooty-looking brunette who must have been sultry in the 1920s regarded him with extreme pain: she was reading Vivekananda’s book on raja yoga. Denny claimed that she was a character from a Scott Fitzgerald novel who’d passed out during a wild party and slept for twenty years. Now she’d just woken up and thought this was all a horrible dream. Finally, the Alabama boy, who’d so far been tolerated with indulgent smiles, scandalized everybody by shouting to an old lady, crippled by arthritis: “Hey, beautiful—come on in! The water’s fine!”

  Still no word from the draft board. It’s very odd. Can they possibly be considering my appeal? I try to keep my mind prepared for a call at any moment. But inevitably, after all this delay, a voice begins to whisper, “Who knows? Maybe they’ve forgotten you. Maybe you won’t have to go.”

  Very hot weather. At night, the cicadas make a tremendous racket. One of them, which is nearly colorless, is as loud and shrill as a police whistle. A big brushfire in the hills above Malibu. The sun set right behind a ridge that was burning—lighting up the great crimson-purple cloud of smoke hanging in the airless sky. It looked like a volcano in eruption.

  October 21. Seen at the Beverly Hills Hotel: a man (probably the house dick) sitting under a palm tree with a magnifying glass and very carefully comparing the signatures on two checks.

  Peggy on the phone (to Maria Huxley, probably): “Well—you know how it is—I’m sorry, darling—hold on just a minute—that’s right—I thought the soup was boiling over, but it wasn’t—Oh, no, no. You mustn’t think that … The only thing I mind is, as soon as I’ve finished, I have to start all over again. Yes—I’m sure it’s the most beautiful discipline in the world. … Well! Golly! That just shows, doesn’t it? We’ve got the rich point of view, you and I! Isn’t it fun? Mercy—my face is red! … My dear, when did I ever get away with that? Oh no—other people can, but not yours truly! I would just know I’d probably begin vomiting and have all the appearance of ulcers! … No—well, you see, it was like this—she wanted to have a party and she said now what would you think—and I said why, I think that’s perfectly splendid—” (And so on, for at least half to three quarters of an hour.)

  October 30. Here I am with Denny in Palm Springs, staying at the Estrella Villas—one of those luxurious bungalow courts with a swimming pool and a bright green lawn which looks as if it had been ordered from a Los Angeles furniture store and unrolled like a carpet. It is crossed by paths of colored crazy pavement. Each cottage has a rustic fireplace, tasselled ropes draped around the windows, Japanese prints, brass marine lamps, fluffy white rugs, cream upholstery with lemon cushions. We’ve already gotten into trouble with the landlord for bringing in puncture-weed thorns on the soles of our shoes: the ground is covered with them.

  All around the village and the airfield with its winking light, spreads the untidy desert with its dry silvery bushes alive in the heat, as seaweed is alive in the sea. In the late afternoon, when Palm Springs is already in shadow, the mountain range across the valley turns mauve and violet in the setting sunshine. It shines in the distance like the landscape of another planet, unearthly, beautiful and dead. Actually—like the mountain behind us—it is nothing but a huge litter of ugly, smashed stones: nature’s lighting effects supply all the glamor. Overhead, the P-38s whine and drone. Since the outbreak of war, the desert seems to belong naturally to the army. It is dotted with new airfields and camps, where troops are trained in warfare under North African conditions. The sterile activity of war drill finds here its ideal setting.

  We go back to Los Angeles the day after tomorrow. Denny is restless and bored, but he really needed the change. While he was in hospital he got terribly thin, with long sinister birdlike legs. A change has come over him—not in the way Gerald hoped and expected, and yet somehow due to Gerald’s influence. He wants to become a psychologist. But before he can even begin to study for his medical degree, he must first get his high-school diploma. He left school without graduating, and now he must start again where he left off all those years ago: one never really dodges anything. As soon as we’re home, he’ll go to UCLA and arrange to take a correspondence course. He can do this in his spare time at camp.

  November 13. Went to Metro, to talk to Lesser Samuels about Maugham’s The Hour Before Dawn, which Lesser may be going to write for Paramount. He wants me to help him—chiefly as a sort of technical adviser on the scenes for the conscientious objector.

  A surprisingly large number of elevator boys and messengers were still at their jobs, despite the draft. There are now exits to air-raid shelters at the ends of the corridors. A writer told me how Victor Saville had reprimanded him for writing a scene in which a man runs in and takes his hat and coat from a bedroom chair. “My dear fellow,” said Saville, “surely you know that the only place a man leaves his coat on the back of a chair is in a whorehouse?”

  We discussed the almost pathological mania which nearly every Hollywood producer has for “virility.” Dore Shary had told Samuels that a scene was “faggoty” merely because it showed an older man talking to some youths of college age.

  Salka Viertel and I had tea with Saville. He was much excited by the favorable war news from Egypt. “Isn’t it marvellous,” he said to me, “to think you and I were sitting in this office at the fall of Dunkirk?” He wants to see Italy not only invaded but thoroughly bombed—“to soften ’em up.” And he’d have Darlan shot as soon as the war is over: “that goddam turncoat sonofabitch.”138

  November 16. Peggy and I went down to the temple for a puja, from 10:00 till 2:00. A big lunch party afterwards, with curry and chatter—about some lady’s hat, and about the beautiful character of the actor Robert Montgomery (I kept my mouth shut): one of the girls was convinced he must be spiritual—with those eyes. Through all this, the Swami sat smiling his Chessy-cat smile.139 Peggy was elaborately bright, but I think the whole thing rather repelled her. She’s very careful, however, not to hurt my feelings. Whenever the temple, or Vedanta, is mentioned, she puts on a specially “arranged” face, decorous and grave—like a little girl in church. Over and over again—rather too often—she says how wonderful the Swami is, and reads all kinds of significance into his slightest remarks. “Did you notice—when Amiya insisted on his taking some more rice—he just smiled very sweetly and said, ‘Thank you’? I though that was beautiful …”

  November 19. Peggy left today for Nevada with Derek, to get her divorce. They’re going to stay at a ranch a few miles outside Reno. They won’t be back till after Christmas. I’m to keep an eye on Ben and Tis—in my capacity of “Uncle”: Peggy has carefully built me up in this role, assuring the children that they adore me, until I feel uneasily that they must hate my guts. However, I’ve already had a deliberately hard-boiled conversation with Ben, telling him that he and Tis can do whatever they like, as long as there is no scandal, no baby, no venereal disease, and provided I don’t have to know about it officially.

  November 28. Last night, Ben and Tis and some friends took the family car and drove downtown. Around midnight, when I was already in bed, the telephone rang. “This is Sergeant Schaefer,” said a man’s voice, “are you a relative of Benjamin and Welmoet Bok? Well, you’
d better come down to the jail. We’re holding them here, on a traffic violation charge. No—they aren’t hurt. But you’d better come down, or they’ll have to spend the night in the cells.” I was sleepy and cross. “I’m not coming down,” I said. “If they’ve been fooling around with the car, it serves them right. A night in the cells won’t hurt them. I’ll take care of it in the morning.” And I went back to bed.

  Next morning, when I came up to breakfast, there sat Ben and Tis. “Well!” I said, feeling relieved and a little bit guilty because of my callousness, “so they let you out after all?” Ben and Tis gaped at me; they didn’t understand what I was talking about. It seems that “Sergeant Schaefer” was a hoax. One of their friends must have done it. Ben says he can guess who it was, and he’ll have his revenge—which rather alarms me. But the effect of my behavior has been highly salutary. I can see that Ben and Tis are shocked because I didn’t rush downtown to save them, but they’re also impressed: it makes them feel that they really are on their own and responsible for what they do. They may not like dear Uncle as much as they did, but at least they don’t despise him.